LOS ANGELES - Marylandian -- A ground-breaking New York Times investigation found a major national chain of behavioral hospitals has lured patients into its facilities and held them against their will until their insurance ran out.[1] Since 2015, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, a mental health industry watchdog has had the company's behavioral facilities under scrutiny for patient abuse, filing tens of thousands of complaints to legislators about alleged unscrupulous practices.

In light of the Times findings—vindicating CCHR's concerns—CCHR wants hospitals that detain patients against their will for profit to be stripped of any license they may have to receive patients to involuntarily commit them. For example, the Florida Administrative Code allows hospitals to obtain a license and be a designated "receiving facility" to involuntarily commit patients under the state's Baker Act.

The Times pointed out that in Florida, hospitals can hold people for 72 hours unless the patients agree to stay longer or a judge or a medical professional determines that they are not ready to leave. Citing a North Tampa behavioral health hospital as an example, the facility was able to exploit this and filed more than 4,500 petitions to extend patients' involuntary stays.

CCHR Florida has been exposing this for many years, and CCHR International has warned of similar abusive practices in other states. The Times also found that in at least 12 of the 19 states where the hospital chain had hospitals, dozens of patients, employees and police officers have alerted the authorities that the company was detaining people in ways that violated the law. In some cases, judges have intervened to force the hospital chain to release patients.

On 12 June 2024, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee released the findings of its two-year investigation into the hospital chain and three others. Their report, "Warehouses of Neglect: How Taxpayers Are Funding Systemic Abuse in Youth Residential Treatment Facilities," mirrored what CCRCHHRHR Int has been reporting for a decade and aligns with the findings of the New York Times investigation. According to the Senate report, "The harms, abuses, and indignities children in [RTFs] have experienced and continue to experience today occur inevitably and by design: they are the direct causal result of a business model that has incentive to treat children as payouts and provide less than adequate safety and behavioral health treatment in order to maximize operating and profit margin." Further, "Providers will continue to operate this model because it's good business, unless there is some bold intervention."[2]

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As part of that necessary intervention, CCHR launched a new public service announcement to help people abused in behavioral facilities to seek recompense. It calls for people who have been abused in such facilities, held against their will or whistleblowers who have "insider information about such abuse," to report this to CCHR.

Other practices The Times found which could be reported to CCHR include:

• Patient symptoms exaggerated and medication dosages tweaked, then claims made that patients needed to stay longer because of the adjustment.
• Holding people who had voluntarily checked themselves in but then changed their minds, or holding them until their insurance runs out.
• Patients or their families needing to hire lawyers to get them released.
• Patients sexually or physically abused, bruised, assaulted or neglected.

All U.S. states have statutes that authorize emergency and inpatient civil commitment, such as involuntary hospitalization. The process implicates constitutional concerns and constraints under the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution, specifically with regard to the liberty interests of the confined patients. Legal issues related to a committed individual's right to receive or to refuse medical treatment during confinement also appear throughout the relevant case law.[3]

In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that "A State cannot constitutionally confine... a non-dangerous individual who is capable of surviving safely in freedom by himself or with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends...."[4]

Jan Eastgate, President of CCHR International says, "Privately owned psychiatric facilities violate this regularly with impunity, and can bilk Medicaid, Medicare and other government and private insurance to cover and financially profit from forced detainment and treatment. This keeps filling investors' pockets despite the devastation caused to patients. It's a shocking comment on the psychiatric industry that it relies on such coercive practices that breed patient abuse."

The Times report reinforces the urgent need for bold interventions, including harsher penalties for abusive hospitals, revoking their licenses to involuntarily commit, shutting down facilities with repeated violations, and ensuring compensation for patients harmed by forced treatment—including those subjected to involuntary commitment.

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CCHR urges anyone who has been abused or unlawfully detained in a behavioral facility to come forward, along with whistleblowers who can expose further wrongdoing. A report can be submitted to CCHR here.

About CCHR: CCHR was established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and professor of psychiatry, Dr. Thomas Szasz, a prolific author who long advocated for the abolishment of involuntary commitment. For decades CCHR has helped to secure legal rights for patients, including informed consent to treatment and the right to refuse it, and the right to legal representation to oppose forced detainment and treatment. It has secured hundreds of laws worldwide to protect patients, including the prohibition of damaging practices such as electroshock on minors, psychosurgery and deep sleep treatment.

Sources:

[1] Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas, "How a Leading Chain of Psychiatric Hospitals Traps Patients: Acadia Healthcare is holding people against their will to maximize insurance payouts, a Times investigation found," The New York Times, 1 Sept. 2024, www.nytimes.com/issue/todayspaper/2024/09/02/todays-new-york-times

[2] Chris Larson, "Senate Finance Committee Releases Excoriating Investigation of Abuse in At-Risk Youth Industry," Behavioral Health Business, 12 June 2024, bhbusiness.com/2024/06/12/senate-finance-committee-releases-excoriating-investigation-of-abuse-in-at-risk-youth-industry/

[3] "Involuntary Civil Commitment: Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Protections," Congressional Research Service, 24 May 2023, crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47571

[4] Melissa McCall, J.D., Legally reviewed by Aviana Cooper, Esq., "Involuntary Commitment: Patient and Public Rights," FindLaw, 25 June 2023, www.findlaw.com/healthcare/patient-rights/involuntary-commitment-patient-and-public-rights.html